My comedian friend Jimmy Dore got to do what journalists rarely do–but should–call out a politician on his BS. This is from his podcast.  I animated it with goAnimate. It’s short, about a minute and a half.

It’s great that most people have a camera, phone, video and audio recorder on them at all times. Politicians and their spokespeople now need to find new ways to dig out of terrible comments. When they can’t “walk it back” or “clarify in context” they just deny they said it.

As John Oliver said on the Daily Show, it’s their job to find politicians and media saying the opposite  of what they said earlier.  And now it can be ALL of our jobs. Fire up those iPhones!

However, the mainstream press love to give politicians, ‘A second bite at the apple’ after a bad quote appears.  In Dan Balz new book, “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America,” We see Mitt in full denial mode.  As  Luke Johnson at the Huffington Post points out in his piece: Mitt Romney On 47 Percent Remark: ‘Actually, I Didn’t Say That’ About Personal Responsibility. This is the third opportunity he got after he was busted.  First the remarks were, “not elegantly stated” and then they were “completely wrong.” but now they are “out of context.”

If journalists don’t hold people responsible for what they say, we should be able to laugh at them for ham-handed attempts at damage control.

BTW, check out Jimmy Dore’s podcasts.  It’s available free on itunes, here’s the link.  When I explain to people what the podcast is like I say. “It’s like the Daily Show, only on radio” and that usually hooks them. One of the guys on the podcast was a former Daily Show writer. (Steve Rosenfield,)

It also usually includes the brilliant Frank Connif who wrote for Mystery Science Theater 3000.  (Favorite Line, “Chris Christie voted for the Defense of Marinara  Act”)

Besides the political comedy they do spot on funny phone calls with celebrities with Mike MacRae, doing Bill O’Reilly, Herman Cain, The Pope, Paula Deen, President Obama, and my favorite, Chris Christie. Robert Yasumura, Stef Zamorano (American’s favorite Mex I CAN), and Paul Kozlowski help write the show and are in on all the bits.

I went to his live stand-up show in Sunnyvale last week and it was great.  I got permission to use the audio for the animation. I might make some more if you like them, especially with Ron Paul and Herman Cain because they make me laugh really hard.  And I think we all need a good laugh these days, I know I do.

By James Petras, 99GetSmart

Introduction

Were recent terror threats invented to bolster the NSA’s case?

Representative democracies and autocratic dictatorships respond to profound internal crises in very distinctive ways: the former attempts to reason with citizens, explaining the causes, consequences and alternatives; dictatorships attempt to terrorize, intimidate and distract the public by evoking bogus external threats, to perpetuate and justify rule by police state methods and avoid facing up to the self-inflicted crises.

Such a bogus fabrication is evident in the Obama regime’s current announcements of an imminent global “terrorist threat”[1] in the face of multiple crises, policy failures and defeats throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Southwest Asia.

Internet ‘Chatter’ Evokes a Global Conspiracy and Revives the Global War on Terror

The entire terror conspiracy propaganda blitz, launched by the Obama regime and propagated by the mass media, is based on the flimsiest sources imaginable, the most laughable pretext. According to White House sources, the National Security Agency, the CIA and other spy agencies claimed to have monitored and intercepted unspecified Al-Qaeda threats, conversations by two Al Qaeda figures including Ayman al Zawahiri[2].

Most damaging, the Obama regime’s claim of a global threat by al-Qaeda, necessitating the shutdown of 19 embassies and consuls and a world-wide travelers alert, flies in the face of repeated public assertions over the past five years that Washington has dealt ‘mortal blows’ to the terrorist organization crippling its operative capacity[3] and citing the US “military successes” in Afghanistan and Iraq, its assassination of Bin Laden, the drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and the US-backed invasion of Libya.  Either the Obama regime was lying in the past or its current terror alert is a fabrication. If, as Obama and the NSA currently claim, Al Qaeda has re-emerged as a global terrorist threat, then twelve years of warfare in Afghanistan and eleven years of war in Iraq, the spending of $1.46 trillion dollars, the loss of over seven thousand US soldiers[4] and the physical and psychological maiming of over a hundred thousand US combatants has been a total and unmitigated disaster and the so-called war on terror is a failure.

The claim of a global terror threat, based on NSA surveillance of two Yemen-based Al Qaeda leaders, is as shallow as it is implausible. Every day throughout cyberspace one or another Islamist terrorist group or individual discuss terror plots, fantasies and plans of no great consequence.

The Obama regime fails to explain why, out of thousands of daily internet ‘conversations’, this particular one, at this particular moment, represents an ongoing viable terrorist operation. One does not need a million spies to pick up jihadist chatter about “attacking Satan”.

For over a decade, Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen have been engaging in a proxy war with Washington-backed regimes and over the same time the Obama regime has been engaged in drone and Special Forces assassination mission against Yemeni militants and opposition figures[5]. In other words, the Obama regime has magnified commonplace events, related to an ongoing conflict known to the public, into a new global terrorist threat as revealed by his spymasters because of their high powered espionage prowess!

It is more than obvious that the Obama regime is engaged in a global fabrication designed to distract world public opinion and, in particular, the majority of US citizens, from police state spying and violations of basic constitutional freedoms.

By evoking a phony “terrorist threat” and its detection by the NSA, Obama hopes to re-legitimate his discredited police state apparatus.

More important, by raising the specter of a global terrorist threat, the Obama regime seeks to cover-up the most disreputable policies, despicable “show trials” and harsh imprisonment of government whistle blowers and political, diplomatic and military defeats and failures which have befallen the empire in the present period. [cont'd.]

Lawrence Henry “Larry” Summers

The supporters of Larry Summers drive to be Fed chair are desperately trying to rewrite history so that this world class champion of financial deregulation was actually a prescient supporter of tighter regulation all along. Exhibit A in this historical rewriting is a report on predatory lending that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Treasury Department put out in 2000, when Summers was Treasury Secretary. The report is featured as an example of Summers’ commitment to regulation in a NYT article comparing Larry Summers’ and Janet Yellen’s record on regulation.

The report contains many sound recommendations about requiring lenders to better disclose terms of loans, limiting loan flipping, and sharply restricting the use of prepayment penalties. The article tells readers:

The report recommended modest changes in federal law but Congress, then controlled by Republicans, made none. The Fed and other banking regulators also ignored the findings.

If readers are unfamiliar with this history of Larry Summers as a crusader for regulations protecting consumers, they can be forgiven. Summers was apparently unable to get even a single mention for this report in the New York Times in the month it was issued. Furthermore, it is inaccurate to imply that the report was a major departure from views held at the time by all Republicans or even Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan.

A NYT article from April 2, 2000 began by telling readers:

After several years of inaction, pressure is building in Washington to impose tighter rules on banks and finance companies that specialize in lending money to homeowners with blemished credit records.

Representative Jim Leach, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the House Banking Committee, said last week that his committee would be pressing for more vigorous enforcement of a law adopted in 1994 to combat deceptive lending practices, and may do more.

Later the piece added:

all four federal banking regulators — including Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve — had spoken out against deceptive lending practices, and some are beginning to develop new regulations.

The piece then goes on to cite comments from Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie Mae, about cutting off access to funds to abusive lenders. It then tells readers;

Wall Street, where Fannie Mae is a formidable voice, is also sensitive to the views of Mr. Greenspan. And he, too, recently condemned predatory lending practices.

‘Although markets have ‘vastly expanded credit to virtually all income classes,’ Mr. Greenspan said in a speech on March 22, he was concerned about ‘abusive lending practices that target specific neighborhoods or vulnerable segments of the population.’

The Fed has formed a multiagency study group to explore ways to address predatory lending, aides to Mr. Greenspan said.

In short the report that the Treasury Department co-authored with HUD under Summers leadership was largely repeating warnings that even the arch-deregulators were also making at the same time. He apparently did not view the issue as important enough to draw even minimal press attention to the report.

The article also notes Summers’ role in stifling Brooksley Born’s effort to regulate derivatives as head of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission. It reports the defense of Summers’ allies:

But he and his supporters have maintained that the failure occurred because the use of derivatives changed over a decade in ways that they did not anticipate.

Actually, the idea that derivatives could pose a threat to financial stability should not have been a surprise to sentient beings even in the late 1990s. Alan Greenspan said that he felt it was necessary for the Fed to intervene in the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in September of 1998 in order to preserve the stability of financial markets. Long-Term Capital had been heavily involved in derivative markets at the time, which should have provided some hint as to ability to create instability for the financial system.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economy and Policy Research. He also writes a regular blog, Beat the Press, where this post originally appeared.